This is a picture of a Norman Door, which means a door that was designed without a user in mind. It comes from the world of industrial design or user design, but slips into semiotics quite easily.
Funny, you might think, that a thing would be designed without a user in mind, since all things are designed for the purpose of being used (talking industrial design here, but this extends to all user interface designs, like websites, or even the control panel of an Apache helicopter).
But there are tons of things we interact with today that were absolutely not designed with us in mind. In fact, you might even say they weren't designed at all, unless you like to give agency to a conglomeration of dozens of interests, angles and entities crossing out each other's ideas until settling on the least messed up version of a thing that still checks all the boxes of all the people...except for the one box that says "good user interface design".
I remember hearing from an old family friend who worked at one of the Bell Labs in the 1980's about how they had people come to teach them about user interface, although he didn't call it that. He recalls learning for the first time why telephones were shaped the way they were, or even that they were shaped that way on purpose at all.
That was the era when we had cognitive psychologist George Miller pushing the 3-4 chunking as the best way to write phone numbers, because we remember things best in groups of 3-4, and why phone numbers on billboards in England look like a mess to the American brain.
Today, we could care less about the user. The user is a consumer; we don't use things, we only purchase them. What we do after they've been purchased, well, the manufacturer-designer could care less about that part. The way a product's user interface is designed is less about easing the user's experience than it is about manipulating the consumer's behavior via shiny surfaces and new colors. (Or via the intentionally unintelligible math that's posted on the post-pandemic phenomenon of Mega-sized toilet paper, which has completely supplanted standard-sized toilet paper, yet not only has less sheets for more money but is bigger than both the average hand and the average toilet paper roll holder.)
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| Scott Comfort Plus Mega Toilet Paper - Notice the intentionally unintelligible math used to stimulate the risk-reward part of your brain, with the adverse effect that you get excited enough by the idea that you're about to win, that you shut off the actual math part of your brain. For example, how are you measuring the "rolls" here -- by weight, by sheet, or by square footage? Because something makes me suspicious that the textured paper makes them look bigger than they are. And is there a national standard for the metrics of a "standard" roll of toilet paper? Because what if they just change the standard size, and compare the new mega rolls to a new standard size they just made up, comparing apples to oranges. The math is unintelligible, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since apparently we just want to play games with our brain while we shop, just ask JCPenny. |
Definition of a Norman Door (why doesn't this have it's own Wikipedia page?)
A door that requires a sign to tell you what to do.
Definition with bigger words:
A door with design elements that give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.
Pictures of Norman Doors
The inspiration for the Norman Door -- Don Norman
Don Norman's book on design -- The Design of Everyday Things (1988)
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| Image credit: Open systems streamline helicopter avionics upgrades, Military Embedded Systems, Apr 2022. |
Sometimes we get good news on the user interface front, or at least some good scientific inquiry. Good news would be hearing about car designers actually integrating these findings into their work. For as long as we have hands and fingers, we will need buttons and knobs.
Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
Aug 17 2022, Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare, via Ars Technica
Designers want a ”clean” interior with minimal switchgear, and the financial department wants to lower the cost.Vi Bilägare gathered eleven modern cars from different manufacturers at an airfield och measured the time needed for a driver to perform different simple tasks, such as changing the radio station or adjusting the climate control. At the same time, the car was driven at 110 km/h (68 mph). We also invited an ”old-school” car without a touchscreen, a 17-year-old Volvo V70, for comparison. [And which destroyed the competition.]One important aspect of this test is that the drivers had time to get to know the cars and their infotainment systems before the test started.Results:
- The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car.
- The easiest car to understand and operate, by a large margin, is the 2005 Volvo V70. The four tasks is handled within ten seconds flat, during which the car is driven 306 meters at 110 km/h.
- At the other end of the scale, Chinese electric car MG Marvel R performs far worse. The driver needs 44.6 seconds before all the tasks are completed, during which the car has travelled 1,372 meters – more than four times the distance compared to the old Volvo.
- BMW iX and Seat Leon perform better, but both are still too complicated. The driver needs almost a kilometer to perform the tasks. Lots can happen in traffic during that time.
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